This depiction of colonial Ste. Genevieve by artist Oscar Berninghaus is among the murals in the Missouri State Capitol. [State Historical Society of Missouri, color transparency in Ralph Walker Photographs Collection, P0108-017298-1]

The French Revolution induced many royalists to emigrate to the Louisiana Territory in the late eighteenth…

Phoebe Apperson Hearst. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Ralph Gregory Photographs Collection (P0604), P0604-10921]

When she was a little girl in pigtails, Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson sometimes rode on the…

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Andrew Henry, a mountain man whose innovations revolutionized the modi operandi of the American fur business…

Thomas James (right) and family. [State Historical Society of Missouri, James Memorial Library Photograph Collection, R1480]

Thomas James spent little of his life in Missouri, but he significantly influenced the state. With a strong…

Lewis Linn. [Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-pga-06434]

A frontier doctor, Jacksonian Democrat, and US senator, Lewis F. Linn has been called both…

This watercolor rendering of “Plan de Luzieres” is thought to show the French ancestral home of Pierre-Charles Delassus de Luzières. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, X08600]

Pierre-Charles Delassus de Luzières played an important role in the history of Upper Louisiana during the…

A cathedral mosaic of Father Sebastien Louis Meurin performing a baptism. [Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis]

Sebastien Louis Meurin served as the parish priest in Ste. Genevieve from 1764 through 1768…

Louis Miller. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Lynn Morrow Papers (R1000)]

Louis Miller was an influential builder-architect who lived in Arcadia, in Iron County, and…

woodcut illustration of the New Madrid quakes

During the early hours of December 16, 1811, a series of violent shakes roused inhabitants of the mid-Mississippi…

A Union encampment in the Arcadia valley early in the war. Pilot Knob Mountain is at right. [Harper’s Weekly, September 21, 1861]

In September of 1864, Confederate army troops led by Major General